In the course of writing an obituary of sorts for the Grand Old Party, Jacob Heilbrunn notes that Donald Trump has attracted some heavy-hitting enemies.
Exhibit A is the Wall Street Journal. Last Thursday its editorial page, which has historically functioned as a kind of conservative Politburo, bashed Trump for his heresies on eminent domain and property rights. “Mr. Trump,” it huffed, “is spinning property seizure as the price of admission for economic progress … but it isn’t true.” Meanwhile, Karl Rove exhorted on the Journal’s opinion page, “Messrs. Kasich, Cruz, Bush and Rubio must resist the temptation to go after one another—which only wastes vital time—and instead concentrate on Mr. Trump.”
And, of course, the National Review recently launched an entire anti-Trump issue of their magazine.
There’s no doubt that there’s a full-court press going on right now to try to derail Trump’s candidacy, but these people and organizations would be nothing without the Republican Party. Assuming they fail in their efforts to stop The Donald, the question is, how long will it be before they come to the Real Estate Tycoon on bended knee and offer to kiss his huge ring?
I expect this is something Trump’s ego would enjoy very much and he’d probably have little trouble being magnanimous. In exchange for a promise of complete fealty in the future, Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal and the National Review would be forgiven for past sins and enlisted into the new Borg.
Of course, at that point, they would cease to serve any movement. They would serve only the great leader and his whims.
Since they have no real alternative, what else could they do?
Of course, if Trump goes on to lose the general election, they’d be able to revert back to their prior donors and business plans.
But, if he actually becomes the president?
For the WSJ, it would be easy. They could just change their name to the Völkischer Beobachter. They’ve been that for the Republican Party for the past ten years and they might as well make it official for The Donald as well.
Pretty standard practice. You get conquered you swear to the new boss or die. The only movement they swore to was one that gained them money and power, in the end not so different.
I’m thinking that this piece goes a long way in explaining what GOP is misunderstanding about Trump’s success.
“Nationalism rather than philosophical commitment to small government is at the core of Conservative politics.”
Nationalism is the distraction from economic pain.
Indeed. See BooMan’s more current post upstream. That Trump has tapped into this, just as GW did, is something I don’t hear talked about much.
WSJ? Before Rupert bought it, it was always very conservative, but one could read it for real information. Now? Not so much.
Of course, if the Donald gets the nomination, Rupert will bow down and kiss the Donald’s yuuuuuuuuuge ring (which is yuuuuuuuger than anyone else’s). Of course, Rupert plays a long game and has other tricks up his sleeve, if needed.
They’ll all kiss the Donald’s yuuuuuuuuuuge hiney if and when the time comes. It’s the Art of the Deal.
You write:
These people are not stupid, Booman. i do not believe that will ever happen. They are immensely wealthy, have even more immense wealth backing them up and are not accustomed to allowing upstart egomaniacs from Queens to crash their carefully groomed Park Ave. parties and Masters Of the Universe meetings.
And—they do have an alternative. One they have already prepped and is waiting in the wings.
Watch.
The moment HRC truly falters,
Mighty Mouse…errrr, ahhh…Mighty Mike will come to save the day.That’s their next-to-the last hole card.
And if that looks like it’s not working?
UH oh!!!
Then Massa Trump be in BIG trouble!!!
Watch.
Watch.
AG
Guns.
Indeed.
AG
Yes, indeed.
But, in case you missed my point (trust me, I did not miss yours), the guns issue is so central to conservative orthodoxy that Bloomberg’s crusade against them precludes organs of the Borg from siding with him against Trump.
If you’re right, it will be much more of a Corsican mafia type solution.
I at least partly agree. The main point is, they do have an alternative — they can nominate somebody else (Bloomberg, Jeb!, a ham sandwich) especially as it is by no means clear that Trump could win a national election anyway. “Let him start his own fucking party” would be the more likely attitude, I think. They’d all lose in the general, but at least this shmuck won’t walk away with their beloved GOP.
This will only work if Sanders is not the Dem nominee.
They need to very accurately triangulate if they do not want to be forced into a position where their 50+ year-old coup d’état is exposed to the mass of people for what it really is.
Very, very accurately.
AG
I see Bloomberg as more of an elite threat to democrats: nominate Sanders, and we’ll run this guy as a spoiler.
At the same time, I think that if its Trump v Clinton, the elites would be cool with Clinton, and would swallow a Trump defeat in order to keep the GOP working for them
If it comes to Trump v Sanders v Bloomberg, it would be the newyorkiest election ever, kind of Queens v Brooklyn vs Manhattan
LOL Indeed.
A.) A Sanders nomination makes that outcome impossible. Argue with the dialectic, and you lose.
b.) Such an outcome would bring the revolution that much closer.
Nach Trump, uns.
I think the idea is, the Democratic Party won’t allow a Sanders nomination, Hillary gets the nomination, then loses to Trump.
This sounds plausible, inasmuch as I’m not sure she could beat Trump. I am sure Sanders could.
But I also doubt the GOP would nominate Trump. And if Sanders continues to do very well in the primaries, I think the Democratic party will come around. In a sense, that’s the key point. It’s Sanders or bust.
“Of course, at that point, they would cease to serve any movement.”
You are kidding, right? Maybe not. You still fail to recognize a populist movement even as it blows up in your face. The so called Conservative Movement was nothing more than Big Money trying to exploit a simmering undercurrent of anger, the making of a real movement, a negative populist movement based on xenophobia, racism and nationalism. Obama’s right, they do all say the same thing. They got what they wanted, just not the direction they wanted. Their base is now voting with their middle finger wanting to stick it to the man and blame everyone who does not look like them. This kind of thing almost conquered the world and not that long ago.
Of course Trump will become President Trump. The Democrats decided to emulate their corporate masters by rigging the Democratic nomination so the Establishment cannot lose. In their greedy desire to protect their power at any cost they did and are doing everything they can to thwart the positive side of that same populist movement that exists on what’s left of their side of the aisle as more voters became Independent rather than Republican or Democratic out of simple disgust. Your beloved center became Populist. There are always those who will argue the Democrats are too smart to pull the trigger on their own demise but think again, they’ve done it before and more than once. The DNC has been the gift that keeps on giving to the Republicans.
Your rant is fine as far as it goes, but it’s not properly addressed to me.
I never argued that the Conservative Movement was anything other than a business financed effort to win support for their interests through the politics of resentment, xenophobia, racism, fear, patriotism and religious supremacy.
Precisely.
ASG
Your hate for Democrats you disapprove of is getting in the way of your political analysis. Not only is a Trump Presidency not a certainty as you claim it is, it’s not even a likelihood. It’s not impossible, but BooMan’s been laying out the analysis here in ways that make sense. These screeds aren’t really grappling with Boo’s analysis; they just come off as position-taking (DLC BAD!)
You’re also assuming much too much re. who will be the Democratic Party nominee. It’s up in the air right now; why are you cashing in your cynical chips so early?
Finally, your beef is not with the DLC. If you end up having the beef that you are frying up in your pan, your beef is with the voters. The voters decide, and are deciding. This “institutional Democrats are blocking the candidates and policies we want!!” whining is very tiresome and wrong. Yes, organize within institutions, including the Party. But when things don’t go the way people want, those people are well served by behaving as political adults and continuing to plug away at the most effective organizing work possible.
It is not the most effective organizing work possible to be writing on blogs that “the DLC is to blame for President Trump!”
A broken clock is usually right twice a day but you get only one thing right. “The voters decide, and are deciding.” In the next moment your clock fails you again because you think my problem is with the voters; it’s not. I’m more than happy to let the voters decide. I can live with the results even to the point of voting for Hillary if she becomes the nominee. I am a very strong believer in small `d’ democracy, whichever way it goes, as long as it’s fair.
Where you keep going off the rails is trying to claim the DNC super delegates are voters. They are not. The only purpose of this DNC invention is to thwart the will of the actual voters so someone like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter but most all someone like Bernie Sanders never gets the nomination. They were warned of the danger but did it anyway. Look it up, it’s easy.
So if Hillary’s DNC steals the nomination, negating the will of the voters, you want us all to behave as “political adults.” Good luck with getting that from the youth voters after the nomination has been stolen from them. Have you ever had anything you cared about stolen from you? How did it make you feel? Fairness is much more important than you think it is.
In my music world in the swing state of Colorado, I come into contact with a lot of young people. To a person they all support Bernie. I often ask them what should happen if Hillary does manage to steal the nomination. The answer I got surprised me. I expected the options to be stay at home or get behind Hillary in the general. To a person they told me, in the circumstances of a stolen nomination, Bernie should run as an Independent. Maybe they will “continue to plug away at the most effective organizing work possible” after all, just not the way you wanted. I’m trying to sound the alarm of just how dangerous this anti-democratic super delegate situation truly is for the Democrats.
Yes I do hate the DNC and parts of the Democratic Establishment because it is dominated by the DLC Clinton Machine embracing neo-liberalism, the economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This is the reason why we desperately need a political revolution to at long last get these (corporatist) people out of power. If the DNC continues down the path they’ve been on for years, giving more and more power the Republicans, sooner rather than later they will destroy what’s left of the Democratic Party. I wonder if you will hate them as much as I do when Trump or Cruz takes the oath of office.
I’m in agreement with a couple of your views here, but I believe that focusing on the DNC is misplaced.
There’s a couple of things I’d ask you to consider. You’ve got this fever dream well established where you imagine Bernie winning the overall votes in the State Primaries and Caucuses by hundreds of cumulative Delegates only to be thwarted by Hillary continuing to enjoy support from a supermajority of superdelegates. That didn’t happen in 2008; when Obama started winning in the States, superdelegates came over to him as well.
You believe you have to execute unveiled threats on behalf of you and your friends to gain an outcome that the superdelegates provided in 2008 and are likely to provide again if Sanders clearly outperforms Clinton in the States. Based on the real history, not the DWS hating, I don’t think you have to do that. All the dark warnings of “stealing” the nomination come off as overwrought to this reader.
I’d add that your personal experience, where you run with a crowd which is almost universally supporting Sanders, is a highly unusual experience. Most of us know liberals/progressives/Party leaders who support both candidates. I think it’s a super bad idea to label Hillary supporters with some nasty label. We’ve got to hold our movement together to win, and thinking poorly of voters who are essentially on your side is no way to get what you want. A perfect illustration is this desire you describe your friends having to get Bernie to run an independent campaign if he loses the nomination. Now that would deliver a President Trump.
Finally, the superdelegates are voters. If you don’t like the Party nomination process, organize at the local level and begin doing your part to change it.
Trump could blow all the right’s granny-starving plans asunder, but will he? The primary goal of the right for almost 80 years has been to destroy the New Deal so they can further cut taxes for the rich. Trump is pledging to uphold the New Deal even as he promises fascistic ethnic cleansing. But, he’s also proposing big tax cuts for the wealthy.
If he gets in office and those two pledges collide, which will he pick? The Republican establishment is afraid he might ditch the tax cuts, and it’s possible, but I think most likely he’ll ditch the promise to uphold the New Deal and pass all Paul Ryan’s granny-starving plans. He would be, after all, a massive beneficiary of all the hoped-for granny-starving.
Except keeping Social Security and Medicare would be very popular. I think Trump, when it gets down to it, prefers to be popular. He knows they’re popular. That’s why he speaks positively of them.
Given the poll-tested popularity of other social-democratic-inflected policies, I anticipate Trump’s counter-proposals.
Let’s have a bidding war…
Trump is certainly not afraid of using the old credit card. And all talk of deficit will disappear.
Quite right, mino. If Trump were to win, in future decades psychopathic conservative leaders would tell people “President Trump proved that deficits don’t matter.”
In fact, Trump is proving it in the 2016 GOP POTUS primary. Why isn’t Cruz attacking Trump on how absurdly high the deficit would be under Trump’s budget announcements? Because deficits don’t matter as long as you’re promising bread and circuses and oppressing The Others and kicking liberal/progressive/Democratic asses.
Cruz’s recent town-hall event cum hectoring, surrealistic diatribe of imagined legal vindication (complete with Glenn Beck-like charts) regarding Trump’s threatened lawsuit smacks of a campaign (and individual) on the verge of breakdown:
In your fever-dreams Rafael, which is to say often.